Professor William Saturno BU CAS arts+sciences Magazine
The Writing on the Wall
by Courtney Humphries
In a former Maya city in the Guatemalan rain forest, a team of BU researchers discovered a buried room whose walls hold paintings and hieroglyphs dating from the ninth century. The writing includes complex numerical calculations for the Maya calendar. It was the first time such paintings had been unearthed in a private dwelling, and the Maya astronomical tables were the earliest found to date. “This is our first look at ninth-century astronomy from the New World,” says team leader and Assistant Professor of Archaeology William Saturno. “We’ve never seen anything like it from this time.” continue reading